Gaspard: Platform Switch Demonstrates Obama Leadership

ICYMI: Patrick Gaspard, DNC executive director and former Obama White House political director, came on CapTon last night several hours after the platform amendment vote debacle and tried to spin the president’s personal involvement in the switch as proof he’s a better, more involved leader than Mitt Romney.

(Clearly, Gaspard rescheduled his appearance with us and NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” I can’t say what happened to his other scheduled sitdowns or Wasserman Schultz’s appearances).

Conservative bloggers seized on the removal of reference from the Democratic platform of references to God and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and Republican candidates (like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s opponent Wendy Long) used the issue to attack their targets.

Also, here in Charlotte, members of key delegations with a high percentage of Jewish members – including New York – were infuriated by the Israel/Jerusalem omission, and worked the phones to make their displeasure known.

By the time the convention gaveled to order at 5 p.m., a decision had been made to return the missing language to the platform.

But as you saw in the post below, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the convention chairman, called the voice vote three times before declaring the two-thirds vote necessary to pass the platform changes had been reached – even though it was pretty clear from where we were sitting in our skybox that the vote was darn near even.

Wasserman Schultz was criticized for denying during a CNN interview that there had been any discord over the platform and insisting the two-thirds threshold had clearly been reached.

During the very first voice vote the mayor was clear and certain that he had a majority but was unsure whether or not it was a two-thirds majority required for passage from down on the floor it was clear that we had the majority, but we wanted to be absolutely certain that it was around two-thirds of the room. That’s why the mayor pressed on, and so by the third time we were absolutely certain.

But Gaspard not only made the same claims during his CapTon interview, but also went one step further, seeking to contrast the president’s decision to intervene in the platform debate with Mitt Romney’s move to allow the very conservative platform to stand – even where it contrasted with his own views – at the GOP convention in Tampa last week.

“It was a wide open conversation of all the delegates who were in the room,” Gaspard said of the vote. “…It was at the time of gavel, and all the delegates know what the call time is and that’s about as democratic as you can be – certainly a good deal more democratic than what we saw in Tampa, which was not a wide open and transparent process.”

“Can I just make one point there? When there were questions raised at the Republican convention about the differences and the daylight between Mitt Romney’s position on abortion and instances of incest and rape and what the Republican platform actually reflected, Mitt Romney said that he had a difference, but he didn’t ask that platform committee to make a change.”

“Here is an instance where the president of the United States understood that there were some questions and some concerns, and he personally made certain that this platform reflected his values and his positions, which I think that there’s a good deal more leadership than Mitt Romney exercised in Tampa.”